'Every era believes that there is a literary genre that
has a kind of primacy. Today, for example, any writer who
has not written a novel is asked when he is going to write
one. (I myself am continually being asked.) In Shakespeare's
time, the literary work par excellence was the vast
epic poem, and that idea persisted into the eighteenth cen-
tury, when we have the example of Voltaire, the least epic
of men, who nevertheless writes an epic because without an epic
he would not have been a true man of letters for his contempo-
raries.' --Borges (1964), in: Selected Non-Fictions

'The long, long night of the Eleventh Month!
   I will cut its waist in two.
Putting the half confusedly
   Under the quilt of the spring wind,

So that, the night he comes back,
   I will unfold it for him.'

Zin-i Hwang, in: A Pageant of Korean Poetry

"the flight was long. we flew on a japanese plane that had strange wallpaper of drawings of little characters from all nations. the ones from italy were botticelli and michelangelo figures. strange to see a man's penis on the wallpaper of a commercial airplane though." --Beck

More on Salam Pax. (via Metafilter)

"DB: With the U.S. economy deteriorating and with more layoffs, how is the
Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state
with permanent war and occupation of numerous countries? How are they going
to pull it off?

NC: They have to pull it off for about another six years. By that time they
hope they will have institutionalized highly reactionary programs within the
United States. They will have left the economy in a very serious state, with
huge deficits, pretty much the way they did in the 1980s. And then it will
be somebody else’s problem to patch it together." --interview with Noam Chomsky

There are some works i seldom listen to, yet represent for me a sort of ne plus ultra of musical
achievement; one of these being the "Threnody to the New Victims of Hiroshima" by Q.R. Ghazala, an
electronic musician who builds his own instruments, including the "vox insecta" which performs this.
His aim was to synthesize an insect voice that is the voice of all insects, & doubtless he has succeeded.
The monotonous, almost subliminally-varying buzz is just a little more disturbing than white noise, & one
can ask if an insect orchestra would really not invest more effort in dynamics, since bugs in general seem
not overfond of repose. But these are quibbles. It's a masterpiece.